About the Book
Cook and Be Cool is a book for the efficient and the lazy — its own words. Twenty complete luncheons or suppers, arranged so that “a few of the recipes given call for food previously cooked but the majority need no cooking at all,” with supplementary recipes to vary them and an Emergency Shelf to keep stocked against “an automobile full of delightful but unexpected guests.”
No title leaf survives in our copy — the scan opens at the preface — so the book is undated here. Its own contents point to about 1930: Vegex and Savita on the shelf, sherry and rum *flavoring* rather than sherry and rum, and an ice-cream freezer you crank by hand. The year is still being established from external records before publication.
The copy we scanned had been used. The book leaves blank leaves headed VARIATIONS AND ADDITIONS for the cook to fill in, and its first owner filled two of them — a Cocoanut Butterscotch Pie and an Orange Shortcake, in a fine copperplate hand. Those two pages are not reproduced here, because a machine cannot read handwriting well enough to be trusted with somebody's recipe.
This edition is built from a dual-engine reading of the original pages, checked against the scans.